Are there any AFMBE players here aside from PhishStyx and myself, of course? I've been fiddling around with the game for a couple of years, but have never found a local group to play it. It's wonderfully open-ended and puts a great deal of the creative control back in the hands of the GM (no company-made metaplots to hamstring us). Hell, you don't even have to use the zombies if you don't want to. With the supplements, you can play fairly straight genre-based games, if you wanted.

Tell me about your gaming experiences with AFMBE. What was done right? What could have been done better? What just plain scared the crap out of you?

ronpyatt

07-12-2007, 02:01 AM

The most memorable was waking up in the middle of the night with 8 mates in a large house full of zombies as we all try to clamber downstairs and outside with only three pistols among us. No one survived! It was fantastic. The scary part was finding the zombie in the shower.

fmitchell

07-12-2007, 03:31 AM

Honestly, I've never played, but I'd like to, if only for the name. Sometimes when I'm alone I say it aloud in various creepy voices. It makes me happy.

Skunkape

07-12-2007, 07:32 AM

I've got the book, very good set of rules, but the guys in my group seem to be rather hesitant with letting me run a game of it. They know I like zombie stuff, so I guess they're afraid that no one would survive a game!:D

I was really active on the forums at the company's site, and have a dead world that I started, but so far haven't had time to finish it. The dead world is based on a free-form RPG we had going for a while on the company's forums. It was lots of fun!

PhishStyx

07-13-2007, 12:34 AM

Well bear in mind, that if I want to play it locally, and it isn't D&D or a White Wolf game (WOD or Exalted), then I'm stuck running the game myself. So I, personally, have actually gotten to play AFMBE exactly once, and that was online.

Moritz

07-13-2007, 08:23 AM

There is a NWN1 server that runs a game like this in a modern setting where you run around trying to stay alive, no magic, a gun, knife, sword, club, and never get beyond level 1. You ultimately die, but isn't it that way with zombie movies?

Mike Taylor

07-15-2007, 06:04 PM

I thought I recognized that screen name, Skunkape.

The kind of game that I want to run might best be categorized more as supernatural action than survival horror. The premise being that instead of one huge Rise of the walking dead, the dead have always had the capacity to come back under the right circumstances. My first adventure was going to center on a Civitateo terrorizing Mexican migrants in a small South Georgia town, then spread out to other types as the characters encounter them including revenants, undead animals, and even a few good old-fashioned Romero-style shamblers.

Moritz

07-16-2007, 08:43 AM

My first adventure was going to center on a Civitateo terrorizing Mexican migrants in a small South Georgia town,

This sounds like a George Bush anti immigration plot - release the zombies to kill off all the illegals.

shilar

07-17-2007, 01:23 AM

Sounds to me like the old Hunter: the Reckoning plots. Actually a fairly good system that one. If you do not mind giving the characters a little edge. Well anyway I'd do it it I weren't 1400 miles away. neh!

Mike Taylor

07-18-2007, 12:39 PM

I also own Hunter: The Reckoning. So yes, some ideas were borrowed from that as well. :) I was thinking more along the lines of it being a back door into playing WitchCraft. In the part of the country where I was living at the time, the title of the latter game would have been a little off-putting. I think Phish can sympathize with that.

Mike Taylor

07-18-2007, 12:51 PM

This sounds like a George Bush anti immigration plot - release the zombies to kill off all the illegals.

The Civitateo is a distinctly Mexican kind of undead, the risen corpse of a woman who died in childbirth. What would have eventually been revealed to the party was that the undead in question was an illegal who had been horribly abused by her husband and had miscarried and died while they were being smuggled into the states.

Moritz

07-18-2007, 02:30 PM

Wow. That's just jacked up.

Mike Taylor

07-19-2007, 12:27 PM

No kidding. Some of the best monsters in horror movies and literature are the ones you can feel a small amount of sympathy for.

Rain_Spider_08

07-19-2007, 02:50 PM

The Civitateo is a distinctly Mexican kind of undead, the risen corpse of a woman who died in childbirth. What would have eventually been revealed to the party was that the undead in question was an illegal who had been horribly abused by her husband and had miscarried and died while they were being smuggled into the states.

Wow, that's very interesting. I'm always interested about learning about folklore and supernatural entities/beings :D (yeah weird hobby but a hobby nonetheless...) From what I just read though the Civitateos were a sort of witch-vampire to the aztecs instead of a zombie. I got this info at http://www.sacrosanctum.org/vampires/encyclopedia/sociology.html ... Still, it sounds like a great plot to go by.

I've always wanted to play AFMBE, I got as much info as I could at it's homepage. Archtype wise (from what the homepage listed) I'd love to play the video store clerk :D it'd be the most fitting.

The most memorable was waking up in the middle of the night with 8 mates in a large house full of zombies as we all try to clamber downstairs and outside with only three pistols among us. No one survived! It was fantastic. The scary part was finding the zombie in the shower.

Haha, that's great! I think I just found the way to start a AFMBE game with my friends.

My group has discussed trying AFMBE at different times. I own a couple of the books and would like to try it sometime.

MortonStromgal

10-22-2007, 01:06 PM

Well it was a one shot set in Freedom West Virgina. An old friend was dying of cancer and having one last drunken party. I played the former college roommate and russian exchange student Ivan Skolofski. He was now a biologist. The GM used movie style with cut scenes and stuff our characters didn't know. As we got drunk with our friend everyone in town turned into zombies. We woke up the next morning with bad hangovers and a town full of zombies. My character figured out that alcohol made you invisible to zombies and prevented the virus from infecting you. Well at this point the cop PC "saved us" by getting her car and driving us out of town, or that was the plan. I had to ride on the roof and she failed a driving roll sending me (the only player who figured out the secret) flying into a group of zombies. Game over man, game over. The game ended with the atom bomb being dropped on the town and a farmilar rat (a pet of the goth kid PC, she was a journalism student) coming out of the ashes with red glowing eyes and a squeak...

Bloodwyrm

01-15-2008, 04:10 PM

I just recently started AFMBE its ok i like the horror setting as i am into RE and All The DEAD Series so when i play more of it with my HomeGroup I'll Post My Input.

jroman

01-16-2008, 08:56 AM

I like AFMBE a lot and run it at conventions like Origins every year. The basic rulebook does the "Night of the Living Dead" pretty well but the sourcebooks are particularly useful. System is pretty flexible and it's easy to switch to the Cinematic Unisystem instead if you like.

So far I've run the following and had good luck with them: Fist Full of Zombies, Enter the Zombie, All Tomorrow's Zombies, Aargh Thar Be Zombies, and Dungeons & Zombies.

The Unisystem rules are easy to use and flexible enough to incorporate anything I need.

kipling

02-19-2008, 12:14 PM

I liked the zombie-specific rules in AFMBE (heck, I even have a character in one of the archetype books) but I always found the Unisystem clunky. Maybe it was through lack of use; I dunno. Feel free to start a PBP game and prove me wrong. :rolleyes:

rabkala

02-24-2008, 09:37 PM

I liked the zombie-specific rules in AFMBE (heck, I even have a character in one of the archetype books) but I always found the Unisystem clunky. Maybe it was through lack of use; I dunno. Feel free to start a PBP game and prove me wrong. :_
Kind of odd, the unisystem was made for speed and ease. I have known many rave of its ease. I have never used it.

kipling

02-25-2008, 08:11 AM

I know; I'm an oddment. But the scale is too compressed for me or the amount seems wrong. For some the Unisystem is lovely, but to me it's halfway to something: not stream-lined enough to be elegant, not crunchy enough to enjoy tweaking.

jroman

03-02-2008, 12:32 PM

I had pretty much the same opinion of the Unisystem when I first started playing it (stats far too compressed) but decided to bite the bullet and run a few games with it at Origins. I ran several using the basic system and one with the cinematic system and was very surprised at how well it handled things. The compressed scale didn't really impact things that much and even PCs with similar stats seemed very different. My preference is for the cinematic version like they use in Army of Darkness and Angel/Buffy and I've since converted my normal game over to these mechanics. Currently running a high powered fantasy game but have oneshots for HKAT, Pirates/Zombies, Apocalypse/Mad Max gaming, and a few others.

Maybe after I get the time, I'll try to setup a game online of one of these as a demo.

rabkala

03-02-2008, 12:59 PM

That would be awesome!

kipling

03-04-2008, 09:41 AM

Yes, it would be full of the awesome.

jroman

03-07-2008, 09:27 AM

I'm in the process of hammering out the final details and will submit a proposal this weekend to start a PbP game of All Flesh.

The delay was caused by me trying to decide which of the following would be better as PbP: ETZ, "Arrgh Thar Be Zombies," a Mad Max/Zombie game and D&Z. I've run each of these scenarios at conventions and think they'd work in this format. PCs are pretty varied and pregens.

I'd like to go with D&Z if that's acceptable. If anyone has a preference or wants details on the other items, please let me know. Realistically, I could run two of these at once provided the proposals are accepted.

Farcaster setup the forum for the AFMBE game I'm going to run. It's called "The Grey Lands" and is in the Dungeons & Zombies venue and is based in a long running campaign of mine. It will use the Cinematic Unisystem and I'll add the details to the forum as I put the final touches on my notes. I can run with about 6 people and have a lot of pregens available. Thanks.